Introduction

Digital Scholarly Editing’s Situation

It’s a golden age of edition-making. Search the World Wide Web for “digital edition” and you will find hundreds; Patrick Sahle’s list of electronic scholarly editions alone featured 821 in February 2023.1 With comparatively little time, some simple web tools, cheap web hosting, an out-of-copyright copy text, and an argument to make about it, almost any academic can become a digital scholarly editor, in the broadest sense of that phrase. There are plenty of books in the library and guides online to help you on your way and introduce you to the dizzying history of scholarly editing in print and electronic media.2

But of course, tools, knowledge, and texts are not the only considerations. “Designing an edition, digital or otherwise, is not a straightforward process of tool-building,” Alan Galey writes, “but a creative act bound up with the cultural history of a text.”3 This sense of the imbrication of past and present, when centered in the editorial process, impacts the conceptualization, development, and maintenance of an edition. The present digital environment is changing, and so are the times, raising questions that call for a rethinking of both the design and the public role of the scholarly editorial project in electronic form. New technologies, platforms, and user expectations are emerging rapidly. On another front, the politics of digital work and its significance in the academy are being called into question. And on still another front, demands for public-serving, ethical, and political engagement are increasingly being articulated by critics of digital projects and by review panels, as funding institutions adjust to both the maturing of the digital humanities and shifting political, social, and economic conditions. When we consider the technical and aesthetic challenges of designing editions for the age of portable or ubiquitous computing; the dedication of major resources for the study of canonical authors in the age of Black Lives Matter, Water Protectors, and #MeToo; and the troubled yet powerful leverage offered by social media in channeling the public outreach of scholarly work, we can’t help but recognize a sea change in the world to which digital scholarly editing must address itself.

The landscape of editing is feeling the impact of linked open data (LOD), the development of application programming interface (API), the widespread adoption of GitHub, and other pathways for exposing, accessing, and repurposing data. In the historical and literary humanities in particular, the contributions of scholarly digital-editing projects to informatics and cultural analytics have been both controversial and revelatory. “The suggestion that quantitative research should count as a typical form of humanistic inquiry is still hotly debated,” writes Ted Underwood; “In the past, it was broadly right to assume that numbers couldn’t address the interpretive questions at the center of humanistic disciplines,” but “the rules of that game have genuinely changed.”4 Underwood has used such techniques to show that literary historians’ assumptions about the durability of literary reputation, the evolution of genres, and the participation of women in the literary marketplace have been off the mark. And the very recent past has witnessed the “mainstreaming”—exciting, troubling, and disruptive—of artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of everyday tools for generating a wide range of visual or textual representation. Still, digital scholarly editions have often imagined themselves, in tune with their print past, as mere primary sources for computational analysis. Are there ways to make such work more integral with the task of editing, and if so, what might be the costs of that convergence? Where are the most likely sites or frameworks for scholarly editors to focus their effort and imagination in this domain?

The rise of Black and Latinx digital humanities, together with decolonial approaches to archival preservation, has led many to rethink the goals and structures of scholarly digital projects. The convergence of scholarly interests with those of particular communities based on historical experiences of inequality points to ways of rooting editorial efforts in particular publics beyond mere textual recovery. Take the award-winning Colored Conventions Project (CCP) as a vivid example: The CCP digitizes the records of nineteenth-century black political conventions, and as such is a leading editorial project. But the CCP’s declared first principle is not textual-editorial, but rather “to enact collective organizing principles and values that were modeled by the Colored Conventions Movement.”5 To this end, the project among other activities involves local communities in transcription projects and serves as a hub for a read-a-thon on Frederick Douglass Day. Nonacademic community members and groups help generate the archive, rather than just using it; community is built rather than just represented by it. This takes a step toward what in other areas of preservation work is called “post-custodial archiving”: the shift from scholars, universities, or libraries owning and authorizing materials to those entities serving as instruments for community needs and as expert consultants on the futures of materials.

At the same time, the CCP takes a stance that qualifies the desirability of text as data. “Data has long served in the processes and recording of the destruction and devaluation of Black lives and communities,” the CCP staff note, so they “seek to avoid exploiting Black subjects as data.” Can editorial projects more generally learn from that ethical caution, which is not limited to racialized communities?6 Such questions extend beyond choices of subject matter and into labor practices, crediting, and the goals of editing in the first place. When it comes to labor, unanswered questions remain about wages and conditions for the graduate students and post-docs doing much of the work in academic editorial projects. Crowdsourcing has question marks, too: clearly Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform raises serious ethical red flags, but it is less obvious what it means either to the integrity of a university-based preservation project (given also that large percentages of university cloud-storage systems are hosted by Amazon) or to the community contributor in a crowdsourcing arrangement that is unpaid and open to all who want to participate. And when it comes to accessibility, most digital editions still struggle to provide access both for those with disabilities and for a multilingual audience. More broadly, as Johanna Drucker has observed, digital interfaces in the humanities tend to “carry with them assumptions of knowledge as observer-independent and certain, rather than observer co-dependent and interpretative.”7

In an age of increasing awareness of the human impact on climate change, sustainability takes on many levels of significance. “What is the place of Digital Humanities (DH) practice in the new social and geological era of the Anthropocene?,” asks Bethany Nowviskie; “What are the DH community’s most significant responsibilities, and to whom?”8 Editorial projects in the past have had to worry about leadership transitions, but seldom their carbon footprints. In a compelling, synoptic effort to frame emerging issues in digital preservation, the Santa Barbara Statement on Collections as Data embraces many of the issues described above, listing key fundamental components or stances that preservation initiatives must consider for sustainability not only during the design phase but in the structure and daily activities of projects. A fundamental implication of the statement is that the technological and financial sustainability of a project are inseparable from its social sustainability, and that the latter requires as careful cultivation as the former.9

How can humanities scholars imagine and enact editions that will respond to the insights and challenges of declarations such as these? Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing gathers together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars to pursue that question. Long-standing struggles in textual scholarship are addressed in new ways in these pages: the definitions of work, text, variation, the author and authorial intent, textual genetics, or the phenomenology and technology of reading; the role of judgment and approach in the editorial act; the nature of collaboration; the relation between authorial pasts and editorial present; or the erosion of editors’ scholarly authority. But the emergences described above form the more pressing occasions for this volume. The insights of feminist, queer, African American, Native American, Disability studies, and postcolonial scholars about the problems associated with re-presenting the cultural-historical record have begun to have a widespread effect on editorial imaginations.10 Those insights began with a focus on canonicity and text selection, but have evolved to challenge more fundamental editorial operations: citation, funding, annotation, marketing, the composition of editorial staff, the relationship of editorial projects to interested communities, and much more. The ethics of care advocated by much of that scholarship may also be found in the increasing focus on the durability of digital editions, a focus that has intensified as climate change impacts the largest framework for sustainability (that of all human endeavors) and transformations in the hardware, software, and human capabilities of digital scholarship increasingly teach us about the difficulties of maintaining any digital project.

And beyond maintenance is, of course, preservation, for if, as Jerome McGann has argued, stasis is an illusion in the print-based textual world, it seems almost antagonistic to the digital one.11 As the affordances of non-print-based editions are increasingly explored and editions that are more dynamic and more integrated with other resources are created, the long-term lives of those projects come into question. “What are editors, publishers, and librarians to do with the conundrum of preserving for scholars of tomorrow the fluid text of today?,” asks Marilyn Deegan.12 It may seem clear that libraries are historically best equipped to do this preservation, but given the tidal wave of digital materials beginning to inundate them, the shortage of funding to hire digital archivists, and the accelerating proliferation of data formats, platforms, software, and hardware, the actuality is considerably more muddy.13 Deegan observed in 2006 that scholars simply hadn’t had to consider the long-term preservation of their editions in the print era. But the maturing of the digital editorial field means that this question converges with the new problematics, both ethical and technical, of textual scholarship in digital environments.

After all, digital preservationists and archivists are as concerned about how to do their work in an ethical, community-sustaining way as they are in coming up with technical ways to manage the tidal wave of digital materials headed their way. Librarians, archivists, and editors are increasingly collaborating, not least because the basic means of storage and requirements for display of digital assets have converged in searching software, image hosting, metadata norms, and flexible and accessible display frameworks. And so the question of how the priorities, imperatives, and limitations of digital preservation in libraries are beginning to shape those of digital editing gives fundamental structure to this volume. Digital archives studies has for some time been at the forefront of reckoning with the shifting role of academic institutions in cultural preservation—most recently and influentially evidenced by Michelle Caswell’s Urgent Archives.14 The librarian F. Gerald Ham heralded what he called the “postcustodial era” of archival policy in an influential address over four decades ago. Archivists’ rethinking of their roles in sociopolitical conflict has been constant ever since, led by provocations like Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook’s essay “Archives, Records and Power” and Verne Harris’s framework of memory for justice. Recently, across the globe, there has been a proliferation of postcustodial partnerships with Indigenous tribes and community organizations.15 Postcustodial effort goes beyond doing preservation in new ways or with new priorities, or providing access for audiences previously blocked from the archives: it seeks to return control of the documents and their representation to descendant communities and interest groups. This reckoning has begun to shape editorial work as well, not merely on noncanonical writers whose work still bears crucial importance for descendant communities, but on major figures whose work treated or was enabled by colonialism, slavery, genocide, and other histories not always considered in traditional editorial treatment. Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing evidences a growing exchange of ideas across the professions of archivist and academic editor with respect to transformations happening in the realms of both technological development and professional ethics.

Digital Scholarly Editing’s Many Futures

The essays published here emerge from a conversation about the futures of scholarly editing and archival projects at a symposium titled “The Walt Whitman Archive and the Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing,” which took place at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in spring 2021. To foster a conversation among field leaders about the future of scholarly editing and archival projects that could be of use to the entire community of people working on the preservation of literary-cultural resources, we assembled a list of contributors diverse in methodological outlooks, professional contexts (scholars, administrators, librarians), national backgrounds, and length of experience in the field. The contributors were asked some hard questions: How can projects like the Whitman Archive update aging technical infrastructures, configure innovative next-generation plans, and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with the technical partners (usually in libraries and archives) necessary to their survival? How can electronic editing projects imagine new collaborations, both within and beyond the humanities world? Share data in a forward-looking, maintainable, but also ethical way? Expand on international partnerships, global outreach, and social media participation, but again, within a framework oriented toward inclusiveness and justice? As headlines about lawsuits against tech industry leaders like Uber, Google, Amazon, and Apple remind us seemingly every week, the challenges faced by technology innovators have less to do with machines and more to do with human relationships and social responsibility. How can the creators of digital scholarly editing projects respond to crucial questions about ethics and about cultural, linguistic, and gender diversity, questions that are increasingly raised not just in the academy but also in public conversations about technological development? And, ultimately, in an age of mixed feelings about technology, how can such projects continue to play a leading role in shaping questions about what literature and culture are, and how these can be represented and studied in a world both linked and fragmented by digital media?

The editors and a few contributors to the volume are affiliated with or veterans of the Walt Whitman Archive. The Whitman Archive is an excellent example of a long-standing, heavily accessed digital archival project that raises all the questions discussed above about politics, organizations, relations between scholars and archivists, and more. Yet, in conversations at the symposium, it became clear that in many ways it is simply unrepresentative. As evidenced in Ed Folsom’s chapter, the Whitman Archive, though free to the end user, has been and remains expensive to build, is dependent on grants, and is not replicable in other institutional contexts. Moreover, while the Whitman Archive has rendered the Good Gray Poet a less monolithic, unitary, single-author figure, nonetheless it could be argued that the canonicity matrix that makes Whitman a representative author for champions of U.S. democracy, queer folk, and innovators of literary form across the globe also benefits the Archive by making it difficult to erode the aura of the author, irrespective of how the Archive is structured. We have tried in these essays to diversify the material evidentiary bases from which contributors argue about the potential futures of digital editorial practice and at the same time to engage both the merits and the faults of projects like the Whitman Archive that have become canonical and materially contributed to the expansion of the field of digital scholarly editing.

The book is divided into two parts, the first focusing on transformations of textual scholarship and the second on the convergence of digital preservation and scholarly editing. This collection was not designed to capture a consensus but rather to stage a conversation—sometimes conflictual, sometimes simply divergent, and occasionally convergent—about many possible futures of digital editing. It is also far from exhaustive. Its dialogic approach is expanded in the Manifold edition of Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing. There can be found, in addition to these essays, reflections on the volume by commentators Morris Eaves, Michelle Caswell, Katherine Bode, and John Young, who have experience in areas that weigh on or usefully refract the ideas and positions represented in the collection: scholarly editing, ethical approaches to digital preservation, digital methods for textual recovery, Black and Indigenous textual scholarship, and digital archiving and preservation.

Each chapter enacts a reconsideration of digital scholarly editing, calling for a reconfiguration of its intellectual nature, realm, and stakes. To put it in a Gramscian way, all the chapters in this collection inquire about how to work and what to do for the creation and preservation of organic intellectual ecosystems, rather than traditional and hegemonic hierarchical structures and infrastructures, for digital projects to develop and to persist. All chapters, then, crucially ask readers to shift their thinking. Julia Flanders, Dirk Van Hulle, Stephanie Browner, and Marta Werner ask us to leave aside any monumental conception of an Ur-text (or “cabinet of curiosities,” as Werner puts it) and the related teleology of an everlasting, authoritative edition, and to concentrate on textual fluidity and broad cultural heritage, in order to show the ever-changing agencies, relationships, and nonneutral practices (in lieu of static categories) that make and mediate texts. This fluidity exposes the complexity, relationality, and sociality that texts inevitably embody in a co-textual, contextual, paratextual, extra-textual sense. Ephemerality, Werner argues, can even be shown to be an essential quality of the work: a poetic but also editorial desideratum.

While Browner points out the complementarities of print and digital formats for authors that have not yet received the intense treatment of scholarly editing, she also notes that scholarly editing and textual-critical trends aren’t universally applied to all literatures, and that this differential is important to account for in thinking about scholarly editing as an activity in the broadest sense. Flanders observes that the “idea of a distributed or community-based or ‘social’ edition can thus take many different forms which, though geometrically analogous in a superficial way, are conceptually quite different in the ways they imagine agency and relationships, and also in the way they imagine human virtue.” Ethics vary; the work that would reflect them consequently varies, and the theory that connects the two varies. Her example of rethinking authorial intent from the standpoint of empathy is striking: to respect the author’s deletions and deliberate silences rather than “recovering” them would be “to situate the author’s work as something other than an object of study, and to orient the editorial enterprise as a whole toward goals other than scholarship as currently understood.”

With the proliferation of open-access digital editions, the pressures being brought to bear by communities of interest on the representation of and access to the cultural-heritage record are already being felt by scholarly editors. As several of our contributors note, Michelle Caswell and Maria Cifor propose that archivists think about the affective attachments that a range of readers have to archival documents, and therefore embrace an audience much wider than the academic.16 Is this true of scholarly editing as well? After all, it’s long been the case that specialized audiences and their publication venues produce, from time to time, extraordinary knowledge that would never have been attained without the space granted to complex, and frankly tedious, analysis and debate. Even if one acknowledges with Elena Pierazzo that “pursuing a large readership is not necessarily a desirable outcome for research editions,” many of the essays here suggest that scholars of race, sexuality, gender, and identity make arguments that strike deeply at the roots of traditional editorial habits, from the choices of works, texts, and collaborators to funding patterns, the establishment of standards, and questions of copyright.17 The practices of African American and Indigenous editors increasingly reflect their embedment in particular communities and their traditions, rather than in a professional situation with its own ethos. “The archivist has an ethical obligation to empathize with all parties impacted by archival use,” writes Caswell and Cifor (38–39). But does the Black archivist whose work may negatively affect those empowered by White supremacy have to have that universal sympathy? And does the Indigenous archivist need to empathize when wrestling with documents that may help revert control of U.S. territory to a tribe? The same question might be turned to editorial empathy, since by definition the scholarly is, at the moment, regulated by a professional ethos rather than one operating extramurally from the academy. It seems likely, as Flanders implies, that the field of digital scholarly editing will witness a struggle over how to respond to the demand for a broadened ethos of care, attentiveness to communities, and responsibility to a wide audience.

Editors’ roles are deeply questioned and revised in these essays. For Van Hulle, the editor is a maker of what Browner calls “generous” connections (which are, as Browner demonstrates, in urgent need of excavation and study in the case of Black literature), and the notion of complete works to be represented has to be fundamentally revised as “oeuvre in motion.” Folsom describes the Whitman Archive as an event and part of a field that will soon, he predicts, simply be called “collaborative humanities” instead of “digital humanities.” And Nicole Gray, while asking the profound postcustodial question of what and why to preserve, and what and why to let go, reflects on the value of the Whitman Archive not so much as a scholarly repository that documents and organizes the, at times, maddeningly complex compositional and publishing work of a single author, but as a continually changing methodology of understanding and representing that world qua world. While accessibility remains a central issue to be promoted and investigated, so is how to facilitate and empower a revolutionized, community-oriented agency of users and co-creators. At the core of K. J. Rawson’s, Sarah Patterson’s, and Robert Warrior’s reflections are attempts at deconstructing old protocols of metadata and annotation practices, by interrogating their ethical and representational implications for inclusion and exposure in order to avoid new forms of oppression, violence, and dispossession. These shifts involve developing new models centered in an ethics of care directed primarily at people and community and less at objects and documents. Interrogating the “scholarly” is not just a matter of thinking about the scope, content, labor model, or rhetorical stance of a project, as Rawson’s piece points out: “When contextualized within the extensive history of cisgender researchers benefiting from studying trans people (often with considerable harm done to trans people),” Rawson notes, “it becomes clear that the DTA [Digital Transgender Archive] can contribute to this problematic legacy if we rely too heavily on scholarly engagement as a central indicator of our project’s impact.” The dream of SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context), mentioned in John Unsworth’s afterword—of a central, free-access repository of information about people—is profoundly complicated by the observations in Rawson’s essay, not least by the reflection that “beyond the individualized impacts of sharing more information about specific trans people, both alive and deceased, our project itself contributes to the increased cultural visibility of trans people that can elicit a violent response.” With Rawson’s piece and several others, we see two developments that complicate the traditional regime of critical judgment. First, they claim that critical judgment is a matter of collaboration, and not only among editors and, in a sense, with the intentions of past subjects or “authors,” but with audiences. Second, there is a sense that the potential implications of that critical judgment have widened, to include not editing in certain circumstances as a result of this collaborative analysis of a historical subject or text.

Fotis Jannidis’s chapter aims at breaking rigid boundaries between editors and audiences but also between the subfields of scholarly editing and computational studies, exploring the promising results of their combined efforts. Elena Pierazzo, sympathizing with this aim but complicating its prosecution, discusses the potentials but also problematic implications of distant editing. Pierazzo sees us in a developing “prolegomena of a computational revolution in editing.” The automatic recognition of handwritten text and other computer vision advances. But the dark side, she warns (echoing Alan Liu’s caveats in his essay on data and transcendence), is that development of these technologies is happening rapidly in the private sector and not as fast among humanists.18 Jannidis is certainly one of those humanistic developers, but while providing a vivid example of the potential mutual benefits for computational literary studies (CLS) and editorial practice, he concurs that field conditions are not yet ideal for the evolution of this kind of work. Noting, for example, the divergent “error culture[s]” within which computational linguists and editors work, he calls for the kind of mutual appreciation of working methods and timelines that facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration and, indeed, the very imagining of new projects. Jannidis’s examples of the utility of CLS for editors suggest that, in the near future, thanks to advances in natural language processing (NLP) techniques, editors may be leaving some of the textual marking they have traditionally done to computers, but also that editors may need to start thinking about what features are markable that, at least for the moment, elude or exceed the AI capacities available to most of us. Put another way, editors, depending on their goals, may not need to tag place names or rhymes, but might want to tag features of the text that would allow for CLS analysis in or across large textual objects.

A number of other issues to be mobilized and rethought emerge from the collection: Cassidy Holahan, Aylin Malcom, and Whitney Trettien discuss how digital platforms like Manicule can bring to light and facilitate new (but also old) practices of “not-reading,” by consulting, touring, visualizing, and experiencing texts nonlinearly. Warrior’s essay would reframe thinking about such platforms in the light of sovereignty histories. Warrior asks us to consider what it would mean to archive the products of Indigenous presses and to account for the particular material necessities for doing that archiving, but also audience relations, project imperatives and benefits, and questions about who receives those benefits. But one might derive from his observations a yet more challenging suggestion: to think about how any activity of archiving and editing could be oriented toward the restoration of Indigenous land, self-determination, and political primacy. The question is raised by postcustodial archival theorists in many cases, but it’s one that has yet quite to register at the level of editorial work based in questions of textual materiality. What would it mean to ground the work more literally in questions of land, dismantlings of settler colonialism, and reconfigurations of agency and authority? Any editorial project might be thought about in terms of what populations it benefits. Imagine a digital edition of Shakespeare whose goal was to center Indigenous sovereignty and the land-back potential of editorial work, a decolonizing stance both material and intellectual. It’s less hard now to imagine such editions of Native materials, thanks to the Mukurtu platform, or to Siobhan Senier’s editorial work, or to editions like Blaire Morseau’s of Simon Pokagon’s birch-bark books.19 But what happens when, at least for U.S.-based projects or materials, it is a matter of the organization and orientation of the entire enterprise, rather than merely about the content?

What Goes Unsaid

“If you listen closely to editors editing,” writes Eaves, sagely, “you will hear the harsh sounds of primal conflict as visionary aspirations clash with reality.”20 While the essays here are informed in part by the conversations we had at the symposium, those conversations also revealed some areas of concern not covered in this volume, and others that, if not quite reaching the level of primal conflict, were shared by the contributors but difficult to resolve, often involving that tension between vision and reality. We report them here without having fully formed addresses to or stances in relation to them, in the spirit of continuing the dialogue with a broader audience.

To make relationality, communities, and contexts the foci or axes of editorial initiatives is a major shift, called for by some of the contributors here, in the spirit of those feminist and antiracist intellectual interventions. But what, other participants wondered, are the practicalities involved with being more “social” and more community engaged? And how do we redescribe editing or scholarly differently in order to do that? Our colleagues in rhetoric and composition studies and public history, to say nothing of libraries doing postcustodial initiatives, might have some guidance for us.21 For starters, if the community is a key editorial partner, and the resource being built is a valuable one in that community, then thinking about an edition or archive’s sustainability—thinking about its ending, as Gray asks us to do from the start—has to involve factors and structures beyond those of hardware/software sustainability or finding an institutional home for the data.22

Two factors in that thinking emerged in discussion: First, it was clear from Rawson’s and Gray’s work, for example, that the conversations that go into the editorial decisions are a key site of intellectual contribution, and not just in the sense that a good conclusion worth reporting to the field is reached, but rather that, conclusion or no, hosting a difficult conversation requires its own foresight, careful navigation, protocol creation, and so on. Yet the methods, ethics, and rewards of reporting these to an academic readership are not, perhaps, as straightforward as the traditional “note on the text.” Second, given this more socially immersed but still text-interested vision of editorial work, how will the training of students be structured? By what means can ethics and employability, and textual historical rigor and the navigation of community politics, be taught together? Participants also wondered whether it was only a matter of individual scholars or their working groups declaring and enforcing ethical standards, or whether some structural change might be imagined. Librarians and archivists have gathered collectives to generate not only the best protocols (comparable to Text Encoding Initiative [TEI]) but also guidelines for professional ethics. Might a coalition of text scholarship groups (e.g., the Association for Documentary Editing, the Bibliographical Society of America, the European Society for Textual Scholarship, the Society for Textual Scholarship, and the Society for the History of Authorship, Readership, and Publishing) think collectively about establishing ethics protocols for editions (broadly defined)? Even were it to fail, the effort could be valuable for what it might tell us about the kinds of investments in the representation of works and texts from the past.

These questions also haunted the discussion of computational approaches to text analysis and representation. Jannidis’s essay speaks to the convergence of edition-making with NLP techniques innovated by computational linguists. On the one hand, another path away from TEI encoding as a standard seems to emerge in thinking of the data-table representation of a text and the dream of automatic collation advances.23 On the other hand, the questions asked about accessibility, the ethics and politics of edition-making, and sustainability loom the larger as we contemplate that other path. One attendee, Melissa Homestead, for example, asked whether canonicity remains a problem with CLS, given the kinds of resources the method requires: it’s convenient to have not only an enormous amount of carefully corrected text but also generations of human observations against which to measure computational findings. Do we not then risk perpetuating canonical tendencies? And the question was raised of whether the semantic level of analysis is, from an editor’s standpoint, only a first step in computational analysis. How far can we go toward automating meta patterns, not just semantic ones, to generate the kind of evidence needed to make humanistic claims about authors and their evolutions in terms of craft methods?

Pierazzo’s essay provocatively asks us to think comparatively about the shifts in editorial theory and practice in the digital age, drawing on the history of linguistics as a field. It was noted in conversation that the pressures on computational linguistics were coming from outside the academy, from Google and other search engine developers, Amazon, medical insurance analysts, and so on, and that this had the double impact of thinning the professorial field (as graduates went into industry instead of the academy) and impacting, in a range of ways, the kind of research that was valued in dissertations, articles, and the like. Might this, too, be instructive as we think about how digital humanities and textual scholarship are evolving, and might evolve in the future? In general, it was noted that the pedagogical questions raised by the contributions could be treated much more deeply.

Interoperability seems self-evidently valuable, and is lauded widely in digital humanities literature and best-practices documents. Yet both Patterson and Rawson raise the question of what happens when not just metadata categories but their underlying ethics differ or are so highly mobile or capacious that individual editorial projects struggle to employ them. One thinks not just of the attempt to bring Library of Congress metadata standards into dialogue with, say, those of the Homosaurus or emerging Native American data nomenclatures, but with other synoptic resources like SNAC.24 And for all its potential and the effort involved to enact it, interoperability does not guarantee re-use, and so we return to the question of interface, both social and technical. Yet, as Pierazzo and others have observed, interfaces, with their many technical and contextual contingencies, are “extremely fragile and very hard to sustain in the long term.”25 Fragility emerged, then, in our discussions of funding, interface design, preservation, and metadata standards.

Fragility seemed significantly a financial matter for many participants. In looking to the future of digital editions, it is clear that more attention needs to be paid to economics. To produce an open-access edition is not the only way to proceed, but it remains a widely embraced ideal, though a challenging one. Ambitious open access sites are free to the end user, but they are typically expensive to produce. For scholars wishing to create fully realized digital editions, freely available and comprehensive in scope, the difficulties are daunting. Lacking a revenue stream from sales, and with institutional support limited in volatile financial times, and with the fit between a project’s goals and the shifting priorities of funding agencies varying from project to project, editors have much to juggle as they strive to build, maintain, and preserve their editions. In fact, the financial landscape is inadequately understood because of a lack of overarching studies of the economics of digital editions. Digital editorial work is still relatively new, takes multiple forms, and treats material of wide-ranging scope and complexity. As the editors of the 2006 anthology Electronic Textual Editing put it, “[past] scholarly debates over what sorts of editions to produce—whether favoring the textual object, the author of the text, or the text’s reception history—were driven as much by economics as by ideology. Quite simply, one could not have it all.”26 “I do not see,” wrote Kathryn Sutherland a few years later, “that the economics (in a wide sense) of the thing really add up as yet.” Over a decade later, today’s advocates of minimal computing would agree.27 Grant funding and the priorities of agencies and foundations matter a great deal if open-access publishing of truly ambitious work is to flourish. Literary scholars hardly want the digital realm to reinscribe a conservative canon. Still, it is possible that the “significance” question that is often the opening question faced by editors when drafting grant proposals can inadvertently serve to reinforce established reputations and hierarchies. To put this another way: who decides what matters? What risks might there be in having foundations and federal agencies take such an oversized role in shaping what from the past can thrive in the present and thus live in the future?

Finally, the valence of the term scholar in scholarly editing often seemed interrogated in thinking about the implications of the contributors’ visions of the future. Do we need to rethink or move away from it? In literary studies, this rethinking was initiated by the postcritical movement; Eve Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, and more recently Rita Felski have been considered the avatars of the movement, but it was started long before by African American and feminist scholars of the 1960s and 1970s, criticizing and reworking the habitual hierarchies of the academy.28 One could think in many ways about this redefinition of the scholar. On the one hand, for example, one could celebrate public humanities, a return to the big media relevance of scholarship—perhaps scholars could win back their cultural authority from the post-truth movement. On the other hand, it could be argued that such a move is a capitulation to neoliberal audience shifts that administrations are currently encouraging, particularly in public universities but not exclusively so, in order to recalibrate the university’s activities not to intellectual or ethical goals but quite openly to instrumental, capitalistic ones. In any case, despite the affordances of the academic institutional environment, it is hard to ignore the vast and powerful gatekeeping apparatus (which functions both passively and actively and not always positively) that underwrites the term “scholarly.”

Why “digital” scholarly editions? In part, this term signals our focus on a subset of the ongoing conversation about textual scholarship and edition-making more broadly. If it may have looked briefly as if digital editions would become the only editions, recent years have witnessed not only the strength of the print edition but the rise of “hybrid” editions (like this one) in both print and digital formats.29 Our focus is on the ongoing impact of and potentials for digital affordances in the work of textual representation. But many of the issues discussed by our contributors, particularly with respect to the work of the editor and the ethics of editorial work in a shifting political, economic, and intellectual landscape, speak more broadly to the question of scholarly editing’s futures as a practice in any format. “To even talk about digital editions as one particular type of edition is debatable,” asserts Mats Dahlström.30 The point is fair, and perhaps the essays here only underscore the practical nature of our choice of title phrase, to focus on editing more than editions.

In 2006, the editors of Electronic Textual Editing made an observation that still rings true:

Even if we start the history of electronic scholarly editions with Father Busa’s punch-card Aquinas in 1949, we are not many decades into developing an understanding of how to make and use electronic documents in general, let alone electronic scholarly editions in particular.31

The subtitle of Peter Shillingsburg’s 1986 Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice indicates a consequent theme appearing in the many tomes on scholarly digital editing that would follow it: finding themselves in a fast-evolving computational environment, editors of volumes precedent to ours often tried hard to keep up with the present (sharing resources, software solutions, and detailed case studies) even as they thought about what could be to come.32 Electronic Textual Editing included a CD-ROM containing the TEI guidelines, as the editors noted that experience with digital editing to that point tended “to be shared in the form of theoretical speculation rather than as practical guidance” (12). Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing does feature some concrete examples of projects doing new things and taking new stances toward editorial activity, stances that at times explicitly or implicitly part ways rather than offering a speculative catechism; but it offers no practical standards or guides, and does a good deal of speculating about potential, and potentially diverging, futures. “From time to time editing is admitted to be a subjective activity,” Shillingsburg wrote back in 1986, “and if that is so, arguments may never cease” (5).

The shibboleth in textual scholarship that denies objectivity in editing has a long pedigree. What is interesting about the recent insights from critical race theory, postcolonialism, feminism, and queer studies, however, is that it’s not only the impossibility of an objective stance that Hans-Georg Gadamer long ago warned of that we must consider, but the negative effects, racist and otherwise, of the belief in, pursuit of, and advocacy for objectivity, however impossible. A version of this debate has played out recently in the circles of digital humanities, particularly over the question of the role of big data or computational corpus analysis in literary scholarship.33 Part of the difficulty is that, the wider the audience for our editorial work, the more likely some part of it will desire a totalizing authority claim for our version of a work or archive of texts. The practitioners of Black bibliography, feminist bibliography, and queer bibliography ask us to embrace the difficulties presented by the web’s widening of audiences for scholarly work as an occasion to change our approaches, rhetorics, and collaborations in ways that will fight patriarchy, white supremacy, xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, and other forms of prejudice and inequality.

“The scholarly editor is interested in the remains of the past and in what those remains tell us about the origin and transmission of texts,” writes David Greetham. Yet decisions about editing, he goes on to say, “must always rest on a careful and articulate assessment of past and present.”34 This yoking of past and present signals a more sophisticated sense of the historicist mentality than, say, G. Thomas Tanselle’s dichotomy of “historical” and “nonhistorical.”35 Not only backward looking, and far from a simple opposition of presentism and historicism, Greetham’s sense of “assessment” involves the scholar’s choice of contextual focus in the past and awareness of the present-day impetus, which indelibly marks any act of historicism. If an editor chooses to assess the past as, say, Christina Sharpe does—slavery’s context extending into the present, in a struggle to extend itself into the future—then she may think differently about everything from punctuation to copy text from how she would if she believes that was then and this is now.36 Scholarly editors, steeped in this navigation of past and present, may also be good guides, whether cautionary or utopian, to potential futures during fraught times, and we hope these essays help foster both conversation and experimentation to that end.

Notes

1. 1. Patrick Sahle, A Catalogue of Digital Scholarly Editions, updated 2023, digitale-edition.de/.

2. 2. Just a few of those helpful works, in addition to those cited later in this volume, include Daniel Apollon, Claire Bélisle, and Philippe Régnier, eds., Digital Critical Editions (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014); Elena Pierazzo and Matthew James Driscoll, eds., Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Darcy Cullen, ed., Editors, Scholars, and the Social Text (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat, eds., Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Richard J. Finneran, ed., The Literary Text in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Peter Robinson, “What Is a Critical Digital Edition?,” Variants 1 (2002): 43–62; Paul Eggert, Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Eggert, The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies: Scholarly Editing and Book History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Jerome J. McGann, “The Rationale of HyperText,” Text 9 (1996): 11–32.

3. 3. Alan Galey, “Signal to Noise: Designing a Digital Edition of The Taming of a Shrew,” College Literature 36, no. 1 (2009): 42.

4. 4. Ted Underwood, “Dear Humanists: Fear Not the Digital Revolution,” Chronicle of Higher Education 65, no. 29 (2019), chronicle.com/article/dear-humanists-fear-not-the-digital-revolution/.

5. 5. Colored Conventions Project, coloredconventions.org/.

6. 6. “Colored Convention Project Principles,” Colored Conventions Project, coloredconventions.org/about/principles/. See also Jacqueline Wernimont, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019).

7. 7. Johanna Drucker, “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display,” digital humanities quarterly 5, no. 1 (2011), digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html.

8. 8. Bethany Nowviskie, “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30, supplement 1 (2015): i4–i15.

9. 9. “Santa Barbara Statement on Collections as Data,” https://collectionsasdata.github.io/statement/.

10. 10. To cite just a few of these, from a vibrant and widespread conversation: Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–37; Autumn Womack, “Reprinting the Past/Re-Ordering Black Social Life,” American Literary History 32, no. 4 (2020): 755–80; Kate Ozment, “Rationale for Feminist Bibliography,” Textual Cultures 13, no. 1 (2020):149–78; Derrick Spires, “On Liberation Bibliography: The 2021 BSA Annual Meeting Keynote,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 116, no. 1 (2022): 1–20; Christen A. Smith, Erica L. Williams, Imani A. Wadud, Whitney N. L. Pirtle, and The Cite Black Women Collective, “Cite Black Women: A Critical Praxis (A Statement),” Feminist Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2021): 10–17; Clare Mullaney, “Dickinson, Disability, and a Crip Editorial Practice,” in The New Emily Dickinson Studies, ed. Michelle Kohler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 280–98; Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2018); Phillip H. Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2018).

11. 11. See Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

12. 12. Marilyn Deegan, “Collection and Preservation of an Electronic Edition,” in Electronic Textual Editing, ed. Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006), 359.

13. 13. James Smithies et al., “Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects: Digital Scholarship & Archiving in King’s Digital Lab,” digital humanities quarterly 13, no. 1 (2019), digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/1/000411/000411.html.

14. 14. Michelle Caswell, Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (New York: Routledge, 2021).

15. 15. See F. Gerald Ham, “Archival Strategies for the Post-Custodial Era,” The American Archivist 44, no. 3 (1981): 207–16; Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 1–19; Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007); and more recently, Dorothy Berry, “The House Archives Built,” up//root, 2021, uproot.space/features/the-house-archives-built. For an early rumination on postcolonial bibliography, see D. C. Greetham, “Textual Imperialism, Post-Colonial Bibliography, and the Poetics of Culture,” in Textual Transgressions: Essays Towards the Construction of a Biobibliography (New York: Garland, 1998), 581–82.

16. 16. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81 (2016): 23–43.

17. 17. Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 9. On copyright being held in part by communities, see Catherine Bell and Val Napoleon, “Introduction, Methodology, and Thematic Overview,” in First Nations Cultural Heritage and Law: Case Studies, Voices, and Perspectives, ed. Catherine Bell and Val Napoleon (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008).

18. 18. Alan Liu, “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2004): 49–84.

19. 19. Mukurtu CMS, mukurtu.org/; Siobhan Senier, Sovereignty and Sustainability: Indigenous Literary Stewardship in New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020); Blaire Morseau, ed., As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in Their Contexts (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2023); see also Kelly Wisecup, Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2021).

20. 20. Morris Eaves, “Multimedia Body Plans: A Self-Assessment,” in Burnard, O’Keeffe, and Unsworth, Electronic Textual Editing, 221.

21. 21. Among others, rhetoric and composition scholar Gabrielle Kelenyi has written about the praxis of adult writing instruction as benefitting from a formally distanced relation between the writing group and the university, as the university can be an antagonistic or inhibitive space for many people (“Our Writing Group: How Low-Income Adults Built a University-Adjacent Writing Community” [PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2023]). Critical-editorial initiatives already feature a range of institutional relations with academic institutions—a perhaps underappreciated realm of textual scholarly creativity—but a deliberate approach to questioning the effect of the university as a culture or setting seemed to be called for by a number of the interlocutors in our discussions.

22. 22. This would presumably be the case irrespective of the location or common thread of the community, from, say, the Indigenous communities for which the Mukurtu platform was built to the space-distributed Trans Metadata Collective that informed, via Slack, the development of the Homosaurus.

23. 23. For other interrogations of TEI, see John Lavagnino, “When Not to Use TEI,” in Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth, Electronic Textual Editing, 334–38; and Desmond Schmidt, “The Inadequacy of Embedded Markup for Cultural Heritage Texts,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25, no. 3 (2010): 337–56.

24. 24. SNAC, snaccooperative.org/.

25. 25. Digital Scholarly Editing, 9

26. 26. Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth, “Introduction,” in Burnard, O’Keeffe, and Unsworth, Electronic Textual Editing, 11.

27. 27. Kathryn Sutherland, “Being Critical: Paper-Based Editing and the Digital Environment,” in Text Editing: Print and the Digital World, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 25. Among other proposals, Sutherland suggests that digital editions consider print-on-demand capabilities to produce reading texts that might quickly saturate smaller readerships (24). For a thoughtful summary and questioning of the minimal-computing movement, see Quinn Dombrowski, “Minimal Computing Maximizes Labor,” digital humanities quarterly 16, no. 2 (2022), digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/2/000594/000594.html.

28. 28. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), 225–248; Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); but see also bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984; repr. London: Pluto, 2000); and Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

29. 29. On hybrid editions, see, among others, David Gants, “Drama Case Study: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson,” in Burnard, O’Keeffe, and Unsworth, Electronic Textual Editing, 122–37; Stephanie P. Browner and Kenneth M. Price, “Charles Chesnutt and the Case for Hybrid Editing,” International Journal of Digital Humanities 1 (2019): 165–78; and Linda Bree and James McLaverty, “The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift and the Future of the Scholarly Edition,” in Deegan and Sutherland, Text Editing, 127–36.

30. 30. Mats Dahlström, “The Compleat Edition,” in Deegan and Sutherland, Text Editing, 29.

31. 31. Burnard, O’Keeffe, and Unsworth, “Introduction,” 20.

32. 32. Peter L. Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). See also the later, 3rd edition, published by the University of Michigan Press in 1996. “I do not think editing is a science,” Shillingsburg wrote, “nor do I think many editors undertake their onerous tasks for any reason other than love” (7).

33. 33. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004); Ted Underwood, “The Theoretical Divide Driving Debates about Computation,” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 4 (2020): 900–912; Nan Z. Da, “On EDA, Complexity, and Redundancy: A Response to Underwood and Weatherby,” Critical Inquiry 46, no. 4 (2020): 913–24; Lisa Gitelman, ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013); and Wernimont, Numbered Lives.

34. 34. David C. Greetham, “Introduction,” in Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research, ed. David C. Greetham (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995), 6.

35. 35. G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Varieties of Scholarly Editing,” in Greetham, Scholarly Editing, 11, 18.

36. 36. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). For a provocative recent meditation in this mode, see Bianca Swift, “‘Time Enough but None to Spare’: Chesnutt Alive in Today’s Archive,” Scholarly Editing 40 (2023).